It's a well-worn, time-tested observation that war changes men. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports, it's apparently transforming some soldiers in Shinwar, Afghanistan into vain creatures obsessed with their own eyebrows. A handful of men stationed at the U.S. Calvary base near the Pakistan border have taken to visiting the local barber for more than a crew-cut.

They're also getting their brows shaved or threaded into precisely sculpted arches. "They're straight guys — just a little metrosexual," says Spc. Rene Ruiz, who maintains a bushy, natural look but has brow-scaping comrades who also shave their legs and arms to better showcase their tattoos.

"I just wanted them to shape up my eyebrows," explains Private First Class Richard Guillemette, whose job is to call in artillery barrages from the front lines.

Pfc. Richard Guillemette, 20, of Lyman, Maine, had his eyebrows shaped by accident the first time, but decided he liked the thin, slightly arched look.

The private's first brow 'do was an accident. He had asked for a haircut and shave at the Afghan barber shop on the U.S. Cavalry base here in Shinwar. Only when it was too late did he realize the barber was tackling uncharted territory. Using a straight-edge razor, the barber sculpted his eyebrows into thin arches, tapering into points at the flanks.

That was a month ago. Pfc. Guillemette, a 20-year-old from Lyman, Maine, decided he liked the look, and he has had two touch-ups since then.

"They were getting a little bushy," he acknowledged in the chow hall recently.

October 14, 2011

Every year I post this video. Why? Because this woman haunted most of my childhood fantasies, and perhaps I fear that when she is forgotten, so will I. Watch this entire short video and tell me this lady ain't something.

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt — the much-touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.

And the engineers at Chevrolet can also rest easy. They have regained precious scientific ground that has lain dormant since:

Wilhelm Röntgen discovered x-rays

Utah was admitted to the Union as the 45th state

Birth of comedian George Burnes

The Tootsie Roll was introduced

The USMC invaded Nicaragua

The Yukon Gold Rush

The first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens

The completion of the American Transcontinental Railroad

The last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, was crowned

The first American automobile accident (a NYC bicyclist was struck)

The first stolen automobile, a Peugeot - in Paris, France

The first movie theater opens in America

Patent for the dial telephone was issued

Chop Suey was invented

Birth of F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is created

National Geographic showed its first naked breast (a Zulu woman)

Washington Ferris, the inventor of the FerrisWheel, died

The first CPA's were certified

The first intercollegiate basketball game (Yale v. Wesleyan)

Birth of USAF Gen. James H. Doolitle (1942 raid on Tokyo)

and

The song "Stars and Stripes forever" was written by John Philip Sousa

Forgive me gentle Reader, but I digress.

But don’t let the car’s 115 years let you think it isn’t tough: It’s present-day owner, who prefers not to be named, told The Daily Caller it still runs like a charm, and has even completed the roughly 60-mile London to Brighton.

But while the Roberts electric car clearly lacked GPS, power steering and, yes, air bags, the distance it could achieve on a charge, when compared with its modern equivalent, provides a telling example of the slow pace of the electric car.

Driven by a tiller instead of a wheel, the Roberts car was built seven years before the Wright brothers’ first flight, 12 years before the Ford Model T, 16 years before Chevrolet was founded and 114 years before the first Chevy Volt was delivered to a customer.

As the New York Times reported September 5, “For General Motors and the Obama administration, the new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid represents the automotive future, the culmination of decades of high-tech research financed partly with federal dollars.”

So hold your head high Mr. "I Can Engineer A Car That Meets The Performance Standards Created In A Basement 115 Years Ago" Man.

October 13, 2011

An optimist would shrug and say, "At least they've stopped eating each other." Gee, I wonder.

For almost three years now there have been reports of a swelling epidemic of child sacrifices in Uganda. The British media (here and here) as well as the Americans (here) have detailed a belief amoung Ugandans that the ritualistic slaughter of a child can help them financially and in other ways. Mothers will return home only to discover the headless corpses of their sons and daughters. And it is still ongoing.

"They have a belief that when you sacrifice a child you get wealth, and there are people who are willing to buy these children for a price. So they have become a commodity of exchange, child sacrifice has become a commercial business."

[...] The work of the police task force has been strongly criticised by the UK-based charity, Jubilee Campaign.

It says in a report that the true number of cases is in the hundreds, and claims more than 900 cases have yet to be investigated by the police because of corruption and a lack of resources.

They reveal missing bone from his skull and damage to a part of his brain after a machete sliced through Allan's head and neck in an attempt to behead him; he was castrated by the witch doctor. It was a month before Allan woke from a coma after being dumped near his village home.

Allan was able to identify his attackers, including a man called Awali. But the police say Allan's eyewitness account is unreliable.

Some children are cut to collect blood for rituals. Local people told us that Awali continues to be involved with child sacrifice.

BBC investigative reporters contacted this witch doctor, Awali, and asked for a consultation. First Awlai slit a goat's throat and demanded $250 for his efforts to bring them luck in starting a construction site. On their next visit they really got serious.

The witch doctor explained that this meeting was to discuss the most powerful spell - the sacrifice of a child.

"There are two ways of doing this," he said. "We can bury the child alive on your construction site, or we cut them in different places and put their blood in a bottle of spiritual medicine."

Awali grabbed his throat. "If it's a male, the whole head is cut off and his genitals. We will dig a hole at your construction site, and also bury the feet and the hands and put them all together in the hole."

This is the result of primitive pagan beliefs. The best remedy is the conversion of Uganda's population to Christainity. Africa may have the fastest growing Christian population in the world, but there is much to be done in Uganda.

October 11, 2011

Two Iranians have been arrested for plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.

(Reuters) - U.S. authorities broke up a plot by two men linked to the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in the United States, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said one of two men charged in the plot, both originally from Iran, had been arrested and had confessed.

The other man, who was still at large, was described in the criminal complaint as being a member of the elite Quds Force, which is part of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

"High-up (Iranian) officials in those agencies ... were responsible for this plot," Holder told a news conference. "I think one has to be concerned about the chilling nature of what the Iranian government attempted to do here," he said.

The two men were charged in a U.S. court. Gholam Shakuri was described in the criminal complaint as a member of the Quds Force and is believed to be in Iran.

Once again the Iranian snake has poked it's head into the U.S. tent. It's long past time to lop it off.

October 10, 2011

I am not a big country music fan, but I definitely am not a fan of the MSM and the spin they put on news. I experienced this as a cop, Sgt. and finally a Lt. when the press took my words and spun them all to hell, or used the statistics I provided in outright misrepresentations. And invariably when I confronted the reporter, they'd blame their editor.

So when Hank Williams Jr. gets slapped around by ESPN, it strikes a resonant chord in me.

So I am posting Hank's website where you can get a free download of his newest song, "Keep The Change" for a limited time. Basically Hanks asserts his right to speak his mind about his love for his country. Hanks has had a storied past, yes - I know - but so have I.

BTW - I stopped listening to network news over twenty years ago and gave up on Fox News about two years ago. They all stink - they lie to make the news more sensational - it's all about making a profit from their advertising and the truth be damned.

October 9, 2011

They are on the move again. Not sure of what they're doing and with no clear defined goals and objectives, Occupy Wall Streeters are nothing but dirty lemmings heading blindly over whatever cliff their leaders direct them. They are too ignorant to understand that they will not be allowed to exist in the society that they think they are advocating.

Lenin dubbed these type of people "useful idiots" and so they are. The gulag is what awaits them and anyone else who fails to realize how political forces are acting to manipulate opinion and intimidate opposition to hopey changey intiatives. This is the devil's work.

Our Constitution was modelled to accomodate a society that understood human nature and the frailities that beset it, especially the lust for power and control over others. Centuries of excess exhibited by Europe's royal families convinced the Founding Fathers that a system of checks and balances was needed to ensure freedom.

But these idiots understand nothing. Our Constitution may not be able to weather these fools without a freshing blood bath and I, for one, accept that freely and without reservation. This is nothing more than a feint, perhaps a rehearsal for wide spread civil disturbances that will paralyze our cities and "force" the government to impose draconian measures on the general population. Even now those measures may already be in place administratively.

An inchoate, seemingly rudderless administration coupled with a sinking economy and civil unrest is a recipe for an anarchical response. Weakness, vacillation, and erosion of institutional authority are an invitation to anarchical thuggery, which looks like welcome strength when compared to feebleness and arbitrariness.

It should be no surprise, then, that the Occupy Wall Street uprisings are happening. After all, such mob uprisings have historical precedent. Anarchy followed by tyranny occurs whenever weakness and a power vacuum, perceived or real, exists.

Examples from history abound, but two cases may be particularly pertinent.

The author cites examples of weak leadership evinced by Louis XVI that unleashed the terrors of the French Revolution and the failure of the Kerensky Provisional government to make reforms that could have removed any popular support for the Bolsheviks.

In present-day America, the stage has been set for civil unrest by an administration whose determined pursuit of change -- based on the radical ideological principles of the left and the concomitant application of wrongheaded "solutions" to a faltering economy -- has left the core institutions of our country weak and reeling.

The fact of the matter is that leftist goals, economic and governmental, are as inherently incompatible with the founding documents and institutions of our Republic as Maximilien Robespierre's goals for France were with the monarchy. The institutions of our country are simply not designed to foster and achieve the radical makeover the Obama administration has in mind. This is, of course, why the powers that be have worked overtime to achieve their leftist goals by supra-governmental means, including the radicalization of agencies like the EPA, entities neither answerable to nor established by the Constitution or subject to the electorate. This is also why Wall Street, the epitome of free-market capitalism, has been targeted by the left -- Wall Street's capitalist principles are also inherently incompatible with schemes bent on distribution of wealth.

I feel we are approaching a tipping point; just over half the country is receiving government benefits. Any disruption to those benefits could spark mass panic. First Amendment rights are nothing but a mask for a hostile leftist agenda embraced by the almost all media outlets. Our system of public education is a self-esteeming disaster and our culture of proud self-reliance is being replaced by a whining, self-aggrandizing culture of victimhood.

Second, there is the distinct possibility that the current protests are a dress rehearsal for creating chaos before and during the elections of 2012. If the current protests achieve even a few goals, it is fair to predict the tactics will be repeated this coming election cycle.

It is conceivable that a combination of anarchists, labor unions, and left-leaning media could unite and utilize the unrest and chaos to derail the 2012 elections themselves, giving the administration the opportunity to suspend elections because of a national emergency. The nightmare that would ensue is almost unimaginable, as the tactics already utilized by the administration could become even more fully utilized. The erosion of the rule of law and constitutional institutions would be assured.

Thus the slippery slope to dictatorship begins.

Lest some cynically dismiss such a scenario as impossible in America -- "It Can't Happen Here" -- it is well to keep in mind that a similar scenario has transpired before in democracies such as the oft-mentioned Weimar Republic. To be clear, the phenomenon is not limited to monarchical eighteenth-century France and tsarist early twentieth-century Russia.

What would a moral, hard-working, upright German citizen have thought was possible on the night just before Germany's July 31, 1932 elections?

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